1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of media devices, and in particular to providing so-called “rich content” to resource limited media devices.
2. Description of the State of the Art
There has been an explosion in the use of resource limited media devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), cell phones, pagers, organizers, and wireless mobile devices. However, these media devices generally have very limited storage, processing power, and where applicable, communication bandwidth. For example, the NTT DoCoMo I-mode phones only have 10 kilobytes (kb) of flash memory for the storage of any one software application. With these limited resources, it is difficult to transfer, process, and render rich content, such as animated images, using existing text based browsers like the Internet Explorer™ browser.
A further complication with these media devices is their wide diversity even within a class from the same manufacturer. The differences may be great enough to force content developers to create tailored content for each model of device.
It is therefore desirable to provide a method and apparatus for providing rich content to media devices, which addresses, in part, some of the shortcomings of providing rich content to media devices noted above.